Neither Maid nor Wife

General Charles de Gaulle, preparing to visit Washington, put in a week of shrewd preliminaries.

Behind the Siena front in Italy, he decorated the U.S. Fifth Army's Lieut. General Mark Clark with the sunburst plaque of Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor. De Gaulle's point: he was the Frenchman entitled to confer French honors.

In Rome, he had himself presented to the Pope as le president, held a press conference, implied willingness to write off Mussolini's "stab in the back" as a historic error for which the Italian people are not responsible. De Gaulle's point: postwar France will be postwar Italy's friend.

In Algiers, he found his ace economic brain-truster, urbane Herve Alphand, back from London after a successful conference with British officials. The British had reportedly agreed to: 1) transfer civil administration of liberated a.eas behind the battlefront to Gaullist commissioners; 2) recognize the Gaullist Committee's right to issue all currency in liberated France; 3) supply food to the liberated population.

The British agreement would be worthless unless Washington endorsed it. No one expected the U.S. Government to grant De Gaulle & Co. outright recognition. But Algiers was optimistic, hopeful that le grand Charlie and Franklin Roosevelt would get along far better in Washington, than they did last year in Casablanca. Cracked a foreign diplomat in expectant Washington: "Us ne passeront pas devant le maire* but there will be a common-law marriage."

* "They will not appear before the mayor" [to be married].

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